Charity cooks: Snowy day rice pudding

When I am snowed in, my thoughts turn to rice pudding.

It’s classic comfort food, and is made with any kind of rice, sugar and milk you have on hand.

Leftover cooked rice?  No problem, just cook it a little less, and stir it a little more. Nothing but brown sugar in the cupboard? Go for it.

Rice pudding is a blank slate, and almost every food culture has some version with spices and flavorings that evoke their cuisine; flavors that make bland food into comfort food.

It can be the tingle of cinnamon, or a vanilla pod.

The Southern branch of my family, a group known for short life spans and dissipation, used to advocate adding raisins soaked in bourbon to improve rice pudding, on the theory that anything marinated in bourbon is much improved.

My favorite rice pudding riff follows the lead of Naomi Duguid in her 2016 book, “Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan.”

Flavored with saffron, cardamom and rosewater, it cheers me up just to smell it cooking, which it does for many hours of a snowy, fragrant day.

Lovely Rice Pudding

Serves 6

1/3 cup white rice

1 quart whole milk

½ cup sugar

Pinch of salt

Pinch of saffron

½ teaspoon ground cardamom, or 6 whole cardamom pods

3 tablespoons rosewater

¼ cup chopped pistachios

1. Pick a heavy 2-quart baking dish that is about as wide as it is high. Add the rice, sugar, milk, salt, saffron, and cardamom and stir with a wooden spoon until the sugar is dissolved.

2. Cook in a 300-degree oven, uncovered, for a total of no more than 2 hours. Every 30 minutes, stir the pudding with the wooden spoon, making sure the skin that forms on top is stirred into the pudding each time.

3. After an hour and a half, add the rose water and stir every 10 minutes, until the pudding thickens, the rice is soft and swollen, but the mixture is still liquid. When the pudding is done, it still looks quite loose, but will thicken as it cools.

4. Remove the pudding from the oven, cover, and allow it to cool to room temperature. Remove the cardamom pods.

5. Serve topped with chopped pistachios. Rice pudding is best eaten slightly warm or room temperature — never cold. If you are not going to serve it right away, refrigerate and reheat very slightly to serve.

Variation for raisin-lovers: Instead of the last four ingredients, put ½ cup of raisins in ¼ cup of bourbon, heat in a microwave for 30 seconds, soak for 10 minutes, drain and add to the milk, rice and sugar along with a stick of cinnamon. Serve with a light dusting of ground cinnamon.